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Landscape with horseman
Landscape with horseman What makes a landscape photograph potentially interesting? I’m not sure if we can speak of a general rule, but by paying extra attention, when composing the photograph, to objects that are not directly related to the landscape itself but are nonetheless part of it, the image can take on additional meaning and…
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Pure landscapes
Pure landscapes Standing in the middle of a beautiful landscape can be a profound experience. The wide vistas allow us to feel the immensity of space, and the sense of the earth upon which we live. This sensation is intensified also by the quality of the sounds we hear; sounds of animals or human beings…
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The hotel room
The hotel room I’d arrived at Haldwani station in the middle of the night and saw that the town was shrouded in complete darkness due to a power cut. With some difficulty, I found someone who could guide me through the darkness to a nearby guesthouse, where I was offered this room. I still remember…
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The waiting room
The waiting room Despite the iron barred doors standing wide open, the ‘Welcome’ sign on the wall doesn’t exactly seem like an unnecessary gesture of encouragement for potential visitors crossing the threshold of this waiting room. The contrast between the space and the sign must have struck me as strangely amusing as I walked past…
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Where I stand
Where I stand After my comments in the previous posts on the Fall of man and Redemption of man, you may like to know where I stand. Well, I’m standing here under this tree and look up and think it’s beautiful. Through our observations of nature, and our thoughts and studies, we have come to…
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Redemption of man
Redemption of man or the cross in the mountains If God is in the details (“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”, Aby Warburg), then He is more present in the fly on the cross than in the man nailed to it. In any case, I have always admired the fly resting for a moment on…
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Fall of man
Fall of man Adam and Eve, driven out of paradise by an angry god. What had they done wrong? They had committed the first, original sin. They had eaten the fruit of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, which God had expressly forbidden. As a result, the first man and woman lost…
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Silent witnesses
Silent witnesses As I walked amongst the thousand-year-old Khmer monuments, with the guardian deities on the gopuras gazing out over the land in all four directions with their inward-turned faces, I could not help but see them as silent witnesses to the horrors that had ravaged Cambodia only a few decades ago. They had all…
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New life, new hope
New life, new hope What does the boy in the photograph see, what does he feel, and what associations does the image of the woman evoke in him? His apparently intense gaze and the way he is holding the woman by the arm suggest that she reminds him of his mother or another close relative.…
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror were gradually able to rebuild their lives. As a quarter of the population had perished, almost every family had lost several loved ones. Some people were…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
